Coal’s high public health cost: Canadian study

A new study of Canada’s most coal-dependent province, released Tuesday, estimates that coal-fired power plants impose a $300 million a year (Canadian) price tag on Alberta’s health care system, cause 4,000 asthma episodes and lead to nearly 100 premature deaths.

Alberta uses almost as much coal as the rest of Canada combined, and gets nearly two-thirds of its electric power from coal. The province is also home to major ice fields and glaciers of the Canadian Rockies, which have been rapidly shrinking, and glacier-fed rivers which have seen flow diminish in recent years.

A coal-fired power plant: Concerns are being raised, from the Ohio Valley to Alberta to the Northwest, about public health costs and greenhouse gas emissions. Are consumers subsidizing Big Coal with their health?

“We know that we have alternate energies that are much cleaner, and the bottom line for us is that Albertans are actually subsidizing the coal industry with their health,” said Farrah Khan of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, and a co-author of the study. Khan was quoted on CBC News.

Others sponsoring the study were the Pembina Institute, the Lung Association of Alberta and the Asthma Society of Canada.

A major power producer, TransAlta, warned that the study’s recommendation for a rapid phaseout of coal would boost electric bills in the Western province.

TransAlta operates the big Centralia Coal Plant, Washington’s largest single source of air pollution. The Calgary-based firm has agreed to a slow phaseout of operations, shutting one coal boiler by 2020 and the other by 2025. Under an agreement with the state, it is permitted to sell long-term contracts in order to finance a transition to natural gas. It is also being required to upgrade air pollution control and reduce emission of nitrogen oxides.

The Alberta study comes a day after two Northwest governors — Govs. Jay Inslee of Washington and John Kitzhaber of Oregon — warned of potential public health consequences if terminals are developed in the two states that would export millions of tons of coal to China. China is the world’s greatest emitter of greenhouse gases, which cause global warming.

“Increasing levels of greenhouse gases and other pollutants resulting from the burning of coal, including pollutants other than CO2 (carbon dioxide), are imposing direct costs on people, businesses and communities in the U.S. and around the world,” Inslee and Kitzhaber wrote to the U.S. Council on Environmental Quality.

“These costs include the public health costs of increased atmospheric deposition of mercury in drinking water sources, as well as costs resulting from ocean acidification, rising sea levels, wildfires, and shrinking snow packs that are key sources of water for the western U.S.

“If the coal ports are developed in Washington and Oregon, wrote the governors, it “could result in CO2 emissions on the order of 240 million tons per year.”